Nuts and Bodyweight – Q&A

Question: I have a follow-up to the article you posted on Monday regarding 10 Tips to Deal with Holiday Weight Gain. A lot of parties I attend during the holidays have various sorts of nuts as snacks and my question is how they impact on body weight. I have read that they are healthy but they also seem to contain a lot of calories, what’s the deal with them? Thank you.

Answer: Nuts are sort of strange nutritionally. On the one hand they are generally very nutritious, they provide a decent amount of quality protein and, although sometimes high in fat, the fats they contain are generally of the healthy kind, nuts are generally high in fiber as well. Nuts are also a good source of magnesium, Vitamin E and research indicates that they may contain important phyto-chemical compounds beneficial to human health; diets containing nuts have also been shown to improve blood lipid profiles.

On the other hand, they can be extremely nutritionally dense (that is, providing a lot of calories in a very low volume). This gives them the potential to negatively affect body weight.

However, a fairly large body of research indicates that nuts don’t seem to impact body weight negatively, at all. That is, various research studies have provided some amount of nuts in addition to the normal diet to see what happens to body weight. In general, the addition of nuts has had limited or no impact on body weight. Phrased differently, despite the addition of calories from nuts, weight doesn’t change/isn’t affected. What’s going on?

Research has identified three possible mechanisms to account for the observed results.

Satiety: Nuts appear to increase fullness and calories from nuts seem to be compensated later in the day. That is, it’s suggested that the calories from nut intake results in a spontaneous decrease in food intake later in the day such that total energy balance is unchanged.

One type of study, called a preload study has examined this, providing a fixed number of calories from nuts and then seeing what happens to spontaneous food intake at a buffet type meal later on. Invariably, nut intake (one study tested almonds, chestnuts, and peanuts) causes people to eat less at the buffet meal

However, despite the impact of nuts on fullness, this still isn’t sufficient to account for the lack of an impact on body weight from nut consumption and other mechanisms must be at work.

Increased Energy Expenditure: Some work has identified an increase in energy expenditure due to nut intake; some research has found an increase in resting energy expenditure with chronic nut intake as well. This could be due to the protein content (protein has the largest effect on TEF for example), the fatty acid profile, or both.

Increased Fecal Energy Loss: With nut consumption, there is increased energy loss in your poop, that is, some proportion (one study found a 7% increase) of ingested calories are excreted without absorption. This is likely due to the fiber content of the nuts or some other compound that limits digestive/absorption capacity for nuts.

The three factors above have been shown to account for 95% of the total energy value of the nuts so there is still a small amount unaccounted for. In any case, nuts, despite their high energy content, simply don’t seem to have the negative impact on body weight that one might expect. Which, mind you, doesn’t mean that you can eat them with no attention to portions or intake of other food, recall that a big part of the above effect is due to caloric compensation. If you’re adding a ton of calories from nuts and don’t end up reducing your intake from other sources, the potential for fat/weight gain certainly is there.

Which is basically a long way of saying to eat them, just not without paying some attention to overall intake.

Comments

I’m starting a new eating plan in the new year where I want to source carbs only from fruit, nuts and veges. That means no bread, pasta, rice or manufactured carbs. I’m interested to see how that will effect my body composition. I’m pretty good now in the sense that I don’t eat much junk food, but I’m curious about how adding more nuts to the diet will affect body composition.

I’m hoping if I follow you plan as per your muscle gain article I should achieve some good results.

I use nuts every day to my daily mid-morning snack of fresh curdled milk. I wish I knew a better term for it, but it is the cheese you get by curdling milk (I use double toned milk). I find it good for increasing my HDL (good lipids) levels, and gives satiety. I think an almond gives 7 calories per piece, and a walnut around 42 calories a piece. Overall, the snack I mention carried around 200 cals.

I think a mistake people make with nuts is eating salted or, worse, sugared. These seem to trigger binging –it’s easier, for me at least, to have just a few nuts if they are raw or dry toasted, no salt.

Rambodoc, I think you can call it paneer (I assume that’s what it is?) if it was strained and pressed.

On nuts, some people are very good at controlling portions and it seems like it’s always easier if they are raw, since there is longer chewing involved and a higher satiety. Roasted, salted, spiced just make it worse both on the nutrition and the compliance front.

Great read, Lyle, thank you

Nicole on
January 14th, 2009 7:09 pm

Maybe I am an anomaly, but I do not find nuts to be satiating Not immediately anyway. I guess I have’t paid much attention to my food intake later in the day though. In fact, after having a serving of walnuts or almonds, I immediately want to eat something else.

Jacqueline Jane't on
January 20th, 2009 8:34 pm

I have a hard time controlling myself when it comes to eating nuts. I love them. I lose control! Especially nut butters. So like anything…..too much of even a good food source will make you FAT!

Elke on
June 4th, 2011 12:33 am

Good article on Nuts!…wanted to know for sure the impact on body comp:….I eat about 3 handfuls of raw, unsalted, unroasted Almonds and Walnuts a day with no fat/weight gain, lots of energy, satiety, and very low carb consumption…thank you for this Article!